WARNING: The following contains minor spoilers for Season 1 of Moriarty the Patriot, currently streaming on Funimation.
Moriarty the Patriot, as the title suggests, is a Sherlock Holmes spinoff that takes the focus away from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective and puts it, instead, on his sworn enemy: Professor William James Moriarty. The crime kingpin and the world's foremost consulting detective were the Batman and Joker of their day where fame is concerned, but almost as well-known as their rivalry itself is how it ends: mutual destruction.
Though the Moriarty the Patriot anime has only just introduced its take on Holmes, there have been clues from the very start that the series is hurtling towards the very same ending for the pair that Conan Doyle originally penned.
Clues lie not in the show's episodes themselves but in its end credits. Typically, anime end credits (EDs) -- and sometimes openings (OPs) -- reveal out-of-context hints of what is yet to come. One Piece, for instance, usually teases new characters who will play an important part in its latest story arc with each new OP. Attack on Titan Season 3, meanwhile, used its OP to hint at Armin's fate. Moriarty's ED doesn't appear to give away much at first glance: In a ruined building (likely the remains of the Moriarty home) a young James Moriarty and his brothers, Louis and Albert, paint brightly-colored, scenic murals on the walls.
One of them is a waterfall, and it's this particular painting that the camera zooms in on before cutting to the trio as adults, dripping wet and standing in the same location. The ground is flooded and the Moriarty family crest is submerged. It then immediately cuts to Sherlock Holmes, who, in the OP, points a gun at his nemesis' head while Moriarty does the same to him.
The idea of fated rivals in anime trying to kill one another is hardly front-page news. Even anime frenemies push each other to this at times. But to those that know their Sherlock Holmes lore, the significance of a waterfall alone is massive -- even more so when the animation draws a line between that, Moriarty and Holmes. In "The Final Problem," first published in 1893, Conan Doyle had the two characters come to blows in Switzerland on top of a waterfall called The Reichenbach Falls. Watson, Holmes' faithful companion, discovers Holmes' and Moriarty's footsteps leading to the Falls' edge... but none returning from it. A letter left behind by his friend confirms that Holmes knew this would be his final confrontation with the dastardly criminal mastermind.
Though Conan Doyle intended this to be his last Sherlock story, his sizeable readership had other ideas: the public outcry over Holmes' death was utterly unprecedented for a fictional character, more or less forcing the author to retroactively pass the fateful fall off as faked in "The Adventure of the Empty House" in 1903.
There's also another reason why we should expect the anime to tell Holmes and Moriarty's "final" story. Though the Moriarty the Patriot manga has only just started to receive English-language volume releases from Viz Media, the series is already in its own "Final Problem" arc ("Saigo no Jiken") in Japan, which is set to reach its conclusion in April. The anime will air the second half of its 24-episode run in the same month. It's unknowable how faithful Ryōsuke Takeuchi and Hikaru Miyoshi's version of the historically controversial story will be -- many other adaptations have only loosely stuck to its original plot; the benefit of hindsight usually enabling Holmes, Moriarty or both to survive then and there.
In some respects, faithfulness might not matter much in this case. Moriarty the Patriot already radically redefines Moriarty as an extremist antihero rather than a straight villain, giving it a unique opportunity to completely change how we view this climactic moment, too. We've never wanted to see Holmes die -- to the point that we (the past 'we') demanded he is resurrected. But with a more sympathetic, nobler Moriarty in the mix, we probably won't want to see either of them plunge to their doom. Even the BBC's iteration of the villain, as fun as actor Andrew Scott made him, was irredeemable enough to need killing off.
Should Moriarty the Patriot carry out "The Final Problem" storyline to completion, it won't be a case of the hero going down with the villain; instead, it'll be the tragic failing of two ideologically-opposed heroes failing to find common ground.
